Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  A three-dimensional map of the Imperial base floated in her mind, rotating as she examined it. The layout was identical to that provided by Dev after his capture of the Kasuga Maru, though some of the rooms appeared to have different functions now. One room, a barracks or dormitory area on the second level, was highlighted.

  "That's where they had most of the civilians locked up," Ozaki explained. "A few of us were in ops and were able to escape. But they're going to kill the others!"

  "We'll see what we can do, Doctor," she said. It wouldn't be easy. Warstriders were designed for combat in the open, not inside buildings, however large or elaborate. "Hari? Put him someplace safe." Turning her attention to the outside of the main building, she compared the structure with the diagram. That barracks area should be about there. . . .

  "Callahan! Langley!" Katya rasped, directing the call to a pair of nearby Swiftstriders. "With me!"

  She plunged ahead into the main building's open equipment bay. The brilliant lights were off now, the building's main power feeds cut, and the interior was cave-dark, illuminated only by the shifting patterns of light and shadow thrown by the high-intensity lamps mounted on the striders' hulls. Her own lights illuminated tangled pipes and cables on walls and overhead, the crisscross steelwork of maintenance gantries, the menacing but unmoving forms of Imperial warstriders laid up for repair or service. The smoking wreckage of a Tachi lay in one corner; nearby, a dozen man-sized shapes in black combat armor sprawled on the duralloy-mesh deck, scythed down by a hivel cannon burst.

  A steel stairway rose to a landing halfway up the far wall; a second set of stairs ran along the wall to a second-level doorway on the right. Katya passed the updated map to the Swiftstriders. "Up those stairs," she told them. "Down the corridor at the top, then to the left. Provide cover for the civilian scientists who want to surrender, and take down anyone who tries to stop you. Move it!"

  "Right, Colonel."

  "Yes, sir!"

  The two Ares-12 striders mounted the stairs, the steps bending and chirping ominously beneath their weight.

  Swiftstriders were lightweight single-slotters, massing less than twelve tons apiece and standing only about three meters tall. Their 18-mm autocannon would be more suitable for the close-up mayhem of warstrider combat inside the confines of a building than, say, Katya's CPG.

  In any case, the floors and stairways of this building would never support the Warlord's sixty-ton tread. Dropping her strider into standby mode, she broke linkage.

  Lying in the near-darkness of her link slot, she felt a warning shudder of claustrophobia as she shifted this way and that, disconnecting her suit from the strider's life support and donning gloves, facemask, and PLSS pack. With a heady rush of relief, she palmed open the hatch, then scrambled out onto the Warlord's dorsal hull.

  Using exterior access jacks, she discovered that both Green and Allen were alive. Kurt Allen emerged from his slot wearing his mask but physically unharmed. He'd been knocked off-line when his linkage systems had failed, and a hit close by his module had depressurized it. His emergency life support gear had saved him, though Katya shuddered at the thought of what he'd gone through, penned up in his black coffin, feeling the strider's movements and unable to tell what was going on outside. As for Ryan Green, his system had been fully operational, though a power failure had killed both his ICS and his comlink circuits, leaving him unable to talk to anyone.

  "You two feel like stretching a bit?" she asked, jerking a thumb at the stairs. "Grab weapons. We're going up there."

  Kilroy's LaG-42 Ghostrider advanced on her, its lights glaring eerily through the smoky cavern. "Colonel?" Kilroy's voice boomed from an external speaker. "What the hell are you doing?"

  "Leading my unit," she snapped back. She wasn't about to wait around out here while her people finished up the fighting inside the building. "Captain Crane will be here in a minute—"

  "He just arrived at the perimeter, Colonel."

  "Okay, good. Tell him he's got command until I go back online."

  "But sir—"

  "Move, damn it!" She grabbed three combat rifles from a hull storage locker and passed two of them to Green and Allen, then checked her own weapon and slapped a full magazine home in the stock receiver. The weapons were Interdynamics PCR-28s, high-velocity rifles firing 4-mm armor-piercing rounds. One mag held two hundred caseless rounds, more, she hoped, than they were likely to need.

  She also grabbed hand lights for the three of them. Out here, without a linkage to the Warlord's night-and fog-piercing senses, it was dark. She made her way down the footrails set into the side of the Warlord's leg, dropped the final meter to the ground, then waved to Green and Allen when they landed next to her. "Let's odie, guys."

  Turning, Katya led the way toward the stairs.

  Chapter 22

  There are three types of leader: Those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; and those who wonder what happened.

  —American military saying

  Mid-twentieth century

  The two Swiftstriders had left the stairway all but impassable to humans on foot, and the door at the top looked like it had been smashed in by a battering ram. Air was still escaping through the opening; with an internal pressure a third higher than that of the native ShraRish atmosphere, air inside the building was now blasting into the maintenance bay with a gale-force wind. Katya and the others leaned into the howling storm and pushed their way in, taking care not to tear their suits on the jagged edges of the door.

  Once inside and on the second level, it was easy enough to follow the trail left by the two Swiftstriders. One wall of the corridor had been chewed open by a burst of automatic cannon fire; several Imperial Marines in full do armor had been standing in front of that wall, but it was impossible now to tell how many there'd been. The sound of high-speed cannon fire, a deep-throated bam-bam-bam, echoed through the dark corridors. The three striderjacks, now temporarily demoted to the status of legger infantry, picked their way past steaming pools of blood and less-identifiable body fragments, then broke into a run.

  The battle was over by the time they got there . . . which was probably fortunate for the three of them, Katya thought later. Wearing nothing but skintight survival suits, masks, and goggles, they would not have lasted long in a stand-up fight with armored marines. Still, Katya was glad they'd come, for when they burst into the barracks, they were confronted with a churning mob of terrified men.

  The two Swiftstriders were there, their legs folded almost double in the close confines, their dorsal hulls brushing against the ceiling. Several marines lay dead outside the smashed-in door, and several more lay on the floor inside. Others stood with their hands raised, automatic weapons and lasers scattered about at their feet. The civilians, though, were on the verge of panic. Someone was shrieking in agony. It was pitch black inside the barracks, save for the warstriders' lights, and somewhere in the distance an alarm was shrilling, warning of pressure-wall breach and air loss.

  "Hidoi koto wa shi masen!" Katya yelled, her voice muffled by her face mask, but still intelligible. "You will not be hurt!" Her spoken Nihongo was limited, rusty, and carried an atrocious accent, but she had enough of the language loaded in her personal RAM to make herself understood. "Listen to me! There are masks and air tanks in emergency equipment lockers in the passageway. File out of the room one at a time, get breathing gear, and proceed to the building's maintenance bay. Do not run. There is plenty of time. . . ."

  Somehow, order was restored. The sight of the two warstriders looming through the shattered door had been, if anything, more terrifying to the civilian scientists and technicians than the appearance of the marines with orders to kill them. Having someone in human shape there, shouting orders and pointing the way with hand lights, was enough to stop the panic before it overwhelmed reason. There was plenty of time. It would take some hours for the air pressure inside the base to equalize with the pressure outside, and only then would enough of the native
ShraRish atmosphere, with its sulfurous gases and dangerously high levels of CO2, mingle with the air inside in quantities enough to pose a threat to people without masks.

  Within an hour, the entire base was secure. Chusa Kosaka was found in the control center, dead by his own hand, and the last of the surviving holdouts among the marines inside the main building had thrown down their weapons and emerged with upraised hands. Twelve more of Katya's people had disembarked from their striders and, armed with hand lasers or PCRs, made their way through the various base structures on foot. They found a total of twenty-one of the civilian personnel dead, five of them in Ops, the rest in the barracks, but another sixty-five were still alive. Those survivors greeted the Confederation troops with that wild and somewhat embarrassing enthusiasm normally reserved for saviors and liberators. A total of over two hundred military officers and enlisted personnel had been captured as well. These were disarmed and locked inside an empty storage dome until more troops could arrive to help handle them.

  The Confederation striders reported in one by one. Only three—hers, Halliwell's, and Sebree's—had been damaged, and there'd been not a single casualty in her team. Not bad, considering they'd just violated one of the oldest precepts of warfare by carrying out a frontal assault on a prepared enemy position.

  Katya was convinced there'd been no other way to do it, given the limitations of the situation. She'd gone into this fearing a casualty rate of forty percent or more, though, and it could have been lots worse had the enemy been organized enough to put up a real fight.

  She was pretty sure that the battle with the Imperials had been the easy part of the mission. Disciplined and well-organized troops nearly always won against rabble, and the Imperials had been rabble, fighting among themselves, lacking morale, and almost totally without leadership. The question they should be asking themselves, she thought, was what had gone so wrong that Imperial Marines had become rabble?

  It was entirely possible, even probable, that establishing peaceful contact with the DalRiss would prove to be more challenging by far.

  Hours later, power had been restored, the air leaks stopped, and the environmental systems set to full capacity, purging the buildings of every lingering trace of the local atmosphere. Soon, personnel could remove their masks and breathing gear or park their striders inside the maintenance bay and at last unjack and unseal from their duralloy mounts.

  Katya, however, was within a virtual reality created by the base AI. "As near as we can tell," she told Dev as she wrapped up her after-action report, "all Imperial personnel on the planet have been accounted for. So far, we've been receiving nothing but cooperation from the civilians. I gather they've been more or less prisoners here ever since the DalRiss attack."

  The ViRcom simulation had placed the two of them together in a richly furnished room with oriental decor and a view of a Zen temple's rock garden through an open door. Birds were singing outside . . . at least, Katya thought they were birds, though she'd never seen one alive. The war, the savagery of that short, sharp fight, seemed a million light-years distant.

  "But why were the marines killing the techies?" Dev wanted to know.

  "I think it was an abortive mutiny. I gather that most of the scientists and other civilians wanted to surrender as soon as they heard Confederation striders were on the surface. Kosaka wouldn't let them, and so some of the techs grabbed weapons and tried to take over Ops. Five civilians were killed there, and Kosaka gave orders to the marines to go ahead and shoot the rest. That's what they were doing when Lieutenants Langley and Callahan smashed through the door."

  "They weren't part of some kind of secret program, then? Something Kosaka didn't want them to tell us?"

  "I don't think so. Anything having to do with DalRiss contact is probably classified secret, of course, but there's not really that much to know. In fact, according to Dr. Ozaki, the Imperials haven't had any direct contact with the DalRiss since the attack, and that was over eight months ago."

  "What, none at all? In eight months?"

  "The Imperials have pretty much stayed indoors, trying to keep out of sight until they got some kind of definitive word from Earth. I have the feeling that they've been terrified of the DalRiss. They still don't know why the locals attacked them in the first place."

  "They have no idea?"

  "None at all. One day, everything was fine. The next, an entire DalRiss city was smashing through the fence. Damage was pretty bad, as we surmised from the orbital scans, though the main building wasn't touched. Kosaka didn't do a thing afterward. He just hunkered down to wait."

  "I'd feel happier knowing just what it was they did to make the locals mad enough to attack them."

  "Believe me," Katya said, "so would I. But Ozaki told me they haven't seen even one DalRiss since the attack eight months ago."

  Dev considered this for a moment. "Okay," he said. "Sit tight and stay alert. Ground troops and more warstriders will be down soon."

  "Dev, I'd like to at least put some patrols out. Nothing aggressive. I just want to know if the DalRiss are close by. I . . . I have a feeling that they are."

  "You saw something?"

  "No. It may just be intuition." She smiled. "Or nerves. But I'm pretty sure that nothing happens in these forests that the DalRiss don't learn about sooner or later."

  "Um. Good point. We don't now how far their symbiosis goes, do we? It might extend to every life-form on the planet. Watch yourself, Kat, and don't go picking any flowers."

  "There aren't any flowers to pick. I'm not sure how plants reproduce here, but apparently it's not by pollination." She frowned. "When we landed, we did trample quite a few plants . . . or whatever the ground cover here is. There's no way to avoid it, really."

  "Come to think of it, I doubt that will upset the DalRiss," Dev said. "Their buildings trample ten-meter-wide swaths when they move. My read on it is that they don't have any particular taboo against killing lower life forms. They use them, in very direct and pragmatic ways. That would fit with the notion that all or most of the life down there was originally created, or at least heavily reworked, by them."

  "Good. I was half-afraid we were up against radical Greenies, here. Even if the plant life is pink and orange instead of green."

  "So far as your idea about putting out patrols—your people can be trusted?"

  "They're good people, Dev. The best."

  "I'll leave it to your judgment. Just don't shoot a DalRiss—or one of their damned walking buildings—by accident." He paused. "Oh, and Katya?"

  "Yes?"

  "That was a good job you pulled down there today."

  She shrugged. "Like I said, I have good people. And the opposition was pretty disorganized."

  "You carried out a well-coordinated and decisive assault in the face of heavy numbers against a fortified position. Your fast action probably saved the lives of a lot of civilians. That was great work, Katya. Real hero stuff, especially the way you charged in there to stop the massacre of the civilians, and I'll see to it that you get full credit for it."

  His praise was warming. "I . . . don't feel very heroic." In fact, she felt quite the opposite. Her wild charge on the Imperial defenses could so easily have gone wrong. Now that the battle was over, she felt weak, drained of strength and of emotion. It was often this way for her after combat, and she knew the best way through it was to keep herselfbusy. There was certainly enough to do.

  "I shouldn't have to remind you, though," Dev continued, "that a colonel's place is not running around in a firefight wearing nothing but a skinsuit and mask."

  "I couldn't very well sit there in a crippled warstrider and just do nothing," she replied, a little stiffly. "And the two Ares-12s might have turned out to be too clumsy to use inside the building." She shrugged. "It worked out okay."

  "Maybe. In future, Colonel, you will stay where you belong, buttoned up inside your command strider directing the overall battle. Understand?"

  "Yes," she said evenly, holding he
r temper. "I do."

  "Good. That's all I have to say right now. I'll talk to you later."

  He dropped out of the linkage, leaving Katya alone. She disengaged and a moment later stepped out of the ViRcom module in Kasuko's office. The air still held a trace of the rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulfide, lingering despite the best efforts of the building's environmental system.

  She found herself teetering between conflicting emotions. It wasn't the rather mild ass-chewing she'd just received. Dev's criticism had been right on target. She'd bitten down hard on the ass of more than one cocky young striderjack who'd wandered off-line from where a strict assessment of his military duties said he ought to be; more than once, that cocky young striderjack had been Dev Cameron, back when he'd been a newbie in her platoon.

  No, her growing fear had more to do with the subtle change in Dev's manner toward her. Years ago, she'd been the senior officer, he the junior. Later, especially when he had returned to almost exclusively naval service while she'd continued jacking warstriders, the two of them had been more or less equal in rank and in command responsibility, but in widely differing spheres.

  Technically, the two of them shared command of Operation Farstar, with him responsible for the space-naval aspect of the expedition while she bossed the ground forces. Technically, too, his rank of commodore gave him the final say if they disagreed on some point of strategy or diplomacy; no military unit could afford the luxury of a democracy in its command structure, and some one individual had to be clearly and definitely in command.

  But she was feeling more and more the growing distance between them. It was hard to put her finger on any one thing that was wrong. Oh, there'd been the nightmare back at Herakles, of course, and all that he'd told her about his battles with his own, private demons, but he'd done nothing wrong enough to warrant mention in an official report. Still, her worry for him had steadily progressed to a gnawing, trapped-animal fear. Why, Dev had actually called her colonel during a private ViRcom exchange, and both his praise and his reprimand had been delivered with the sure and detached formality of a senior officer addressing a junior. She was still hoping for a chance to continue the discussion they'd begun in space, but for the foreseeable future, he would be in orbit while she was on ShraRish. For now, at least, it was better to try to ignore the change she saw in the man and concentrate on the business of contacting the DalRiss.